


Reworked

by venndaai



Category: A House of Many Doors (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 23:23:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16314641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: How Genevieve came to the House.





	Reworked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



Genevieve Caul became a vampire when she was twenty-nine years old. The plague had swept through the city that year like a tide, and Genevieve’s family was laborer caste; they had no money for doctors. Instead her sibling waited for nightfall, then found one of the vampires who lurked in the streets, feeding off of plague victims. They paid the vampire to turn Genevieve. She didn’t remember the transformation itself, just the quiet conversation afterward with the older vampire. “Daylight’ll roast you,” the vampire said. Her skin was wrinkled like a dried fruit husk. “Silver’ll poison you. Humans’ll get you if you’re not careful. We’re their natural predators, but there’s too many of them. We can’t hunt, can’t live like we’re supposed to, can only hang on to life by grabbing the weakest members of the herd now and again.” 

Genevieve listened, still in the cold shock of this can’t be happening, contrasting with the heat of the vampire’s blood still burning through her veins. 

“We’re the lowest of the low, girl,” the ancient creature told her in a harsh whisper. “But there are other worlds out there where we’re kings. You remember that.”

Genevieve left without speaking to her family again, and wandered through the city, down elegant streets empty and smelling of rot, down an unfamiliar alley that twisted and turned and grew darker and darker until-

The cobblestones beneath her feet turned to packed bone-dry dust. The stinking air went dead and cold. The moons fled. 

Her eyes, newly transformed, sharpened, searching out the faintest glimmer of light; but there was none. She was in the House. 

 

She walked for three days. Vampiric strength made it easy. Her footfalls made barely any sound, barely disturbed the dust. At one point she stopped and dug until she hit what felt like wood, like floorboards. That was when she began to realize the scale of her situation. 

She came across the skeletons of animals, sometimes, bones polished smooth. Piles of rocks. At one point the dust grew wet and muddy, and her eyes thought they saw a glow ahead; she ran swift-footed through the black until she came to the grove of mushrooms, giant and slick and bioluminescent. She didn’t dare try to eat them, though hunger was now gnawing at her.

 

On the third day she was found. 

The noise was what she heard first, the clattering, banging, hissing, screaming noise, something she had no frame of reference for- her world had never invented trains.

Then the light, barely registered before it was on her, before she was blinded and shrieking with pain. 

So she didn’t see the faces of the people who trussed her up with rough ropes and tossed her in a hot metal compartment, but she could smell them, and the dizzying wave of hunger was just one more item on the sensory overload list. It was a long time before she could do anything but cry, hot tears of vampire blood splashing down her cheeks. 

Eventually, her eyes and ears and nose adjusted, and at some point there was the sound of a bolt sliding and someone came into the compartment where she was imprisoned. They looked like a human, dressed in a surprising dapper little suit of red and black, but her senses told her she was being observed by another of her kind. 

“Dreadfully sorry about this, my girl,” the vampire said. “Nothing to do with me, I’m just a paying passenger. Paying on safe delivery, otherwise I’d probably be tied up with you, bound for the slave hives of Scornvaunt. Do you know what they do to thralls there? Of course you don’t.” The vampire’s eyes glittered, small and beady in a dark face. “You’re a new arrival, aren’t you? Well. Welcome to the House.”

Genevieve glared, defiant. But inside her was growing a new kind of hunger. This vampire wasn’t at all like the ones in her world. They weren't ragged and filthy and stinking of decay. Their voice was confident, refined. 

They crouched down in front of her. “I have wonderful news for you, dear thing. You’ve arrived in paradise. There is no uncivilized, brutal Sun here, only soft darkness, and so many, many humans from worlds without vampires, who don’t believe we exist, who don’t watch for us.” The vampire smiled toothily. “What a shame you won’t get to enjoy it, collared as a wasp thrall.” 

It was a very easy decision to make. “What do you want from me?” Genevieve rasped. 

The vampire smiled.

 

They waited until the kinetopede was in an inhabited room. Less than an hour’s scuttle from the City of Masks, which translated into half a day’s walk for two vampires, strong and fast and fully sated. 

“Let us go to parties and dress ourselves in the latest fashions,” Genevieve’s new friend suggested. “Let us stalk the play-houses and pleasure-gardens.” But Genevieve wandered the streets looking at an infinite diversity of people, and stopped in front of a stone edifice decorated with rippling waves of paper. 

Listening to passers-by, she learned it was a library. 

No one ever taught Genevieve to read. But vampires have an intense, single-minded degree of focus and determination, when they are hungry for something, and what Genevieve hungered for was to be clever. 

She would make herself clever, she would be sophisticated and reasoned and confident, and no one would look down on her. She would be an academic, or a writer, or a doctor… Doctors had access to blood, and while the hunger had abated she anticipated its return. 

She could be whatever she wanted. She had all the time in the world.


End file.
